Walking, eating well, dancing and camping in glamping «super comfortable». This is the proposal of the Caminhaxial Festival, which takes place between the 28th and 30th of April and will have «many new features», as João Ministro revealed firsthand to the Sul Informação.
According to the Algarve businessman, founder of ProActiveTur, which organizes this Cooperative for the Development of Low Density Territories (QRER) in partnership with the Estela Project, the provision of new accommodation solutions is the great novelty of this year's edition, whose registration opens on Wednesday, March 1st.
«We have a partnership with a glamping, the Domo Camp Portugal, and we will have super comfortable tents there, to guarantee accommodation, for those who want to stay there and sleep in Ameixial», the village in the interior of the municipality of Loulé that hosts and names the event, revealed João Ministro .
The company will provide “glamorous and very comfortable tents during the days of the festival”, where there will be no shortage of beds with “real” mattresses or electricity, which will have to be reserved in advance.
The camp will be built "on land belonging to the Parish Council, next to the nursing home, where the former rural Camping Park used to be, which has access to changing rooms".
«We have already secured some for the organization and managed to close a relatively friendly price with them», said the businessman. Reservations can now be made through the Domo Camp Portugal website.
Another bet that the organization of the also known as Walking Festival of Ameixial (WFA) will make is “in the international part. We finally have the whole site in English and we solved one of the flaws that we still had. We even have a group of 40 people from Luxembourg who contacted us and who will be here at the festival, as well as another group from the Netherlands. And these are the ones who contacted us”.
But the news of the «first hiking festival in Portugal», which celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2023, does not stop there.
“Let's have more excitement. Normally, there was only animation on Saturday and, this year, there will also be on Friday», revealed João Ministro.
On the other hand, “new routes will be proposed. One of the novelties we have this year is a long walk, from Alte to Ameixial, around 40 kilometers or more».
On a gastronomic level, the partnership with Casa do Povo and Café Central will continue, as well as with a vegan food van, as last year.
Moreover, whether you go to Ameixial on foot, you can enjoy the usual dances, workshops and lectures, which are always part of the WFA program, «with emphasis on the new application of Via Algarviana or the partnership between In Loco and WWF in around “Green Jobs”».
The Algarvensis Geopark will promote activities for families and the Estela Project «will continue to disseminate the mysterious writing of the Southwest, a unique element of this territory that this festival has adopted as its identity mark since the beginning».
The 2023 edition of the Caminhaxial Festival will also be marked by a strong interaction with the local community.
«We are going to recover the hayloft of the Corte d'Ouro, as we had done a few years ago. Mr. Manuel asked us again for help, and we are going to hold a workshop open to all who want to participate, to recover the roof made of rye straw from the haystack», revealed the co-organizer of the event.
The program also includes “an action with historian Luís Palma, who is from there and wrote the monograph on Ameixial. He will do a special activity, which includes a lecture and a walk».
As for the objective of the festival, it is the same as always: «promoting the Algarve interior, its natural and cultural values, in a responsible and sustainable approach, and proving that this region is neither forgotten nor resigned to abandonment», according to QRER.
«The values of tangible and intangible heritage, biodiversity, human activity and its ancestral relationship with the landscape, are elements rooted in the mission of this festival that, from the beginning, seeks to help disseminate and safeguard. Walks are, in this case, the reason and argument for this strategy, and there are many that have been carried out over these years and those that will take place in 2023», adds the cooperative.
The program is in the final stages of elaboration and «awaits other news that will be revealed in due time».
The Walking Festival Ameixial is an initiative of the Cooperative for the Development of Low Density Territories (QRER), organized by Proactivetur and Projecto Estela and has the support of the Municipality of Loulé, the Tourism Region of the Algarve, the Parish Council of Ameixial and Grupo Desportivo Ameixalense.
In 2023, the Caminhaxial Festival also has partnerships with the ICNF, APA, Decathlon, Sul Informação, Loulé Municipal Museum and is once again part of the territorial dynamics of the aspiring Algarvensis Geopark.
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